A New Pull Request Processing Time Record

We have a new record average time to process a pull request: 21 days!

Part of my job is following (and trying to improve of course) some key metrics about MariaDB Server pull request processing. As a part of that I compile a nice pull request metric and a graph of it. This is what it looked like for the last month:

There’s a single number that caught my attention: 21.05 ! This is a new record low! That’s how much it takes on average from opening a pull request to closing it for all the requests closed last month!

This is what huge improvement in the processes looks like! And a true team effort! Thank you to all reviewers! Especially to the MariaDB plc engineers! It’s been declining for some time now, but this is faster than anything we’ve done for the last year!

Other note-worthy points in the graph are:

• The excitement around the Google Summer of Code adjustment period is behind us now. And we’re back to our “normal” program.
• Even past the wave, we’re still receiving about double the amount of pull requests compared to last year. That’s a nice growth trend that we need to keep up with.
• We seem to be doing well in terms of inflow-vs-outflow: we’ve caught up with this year’s wave and we are still keeping up closing pull requests in lock-step.

That’s what a healthy contribution ecosystem looks like IMHO. Keep these numbers in mind when considering your next contribution!

P.S. In case you want to check how I am fetching these: these are the opened and closed counting scripts I’m using.